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Where We Stand: Card Check

NFIB Opposes H.R. 1490/S.560, The Employee Free Choice Act

Key Reasons

  • Card check eliminates the private ballot during union organizing elections. Without the private ballot, workers are exposed to misinformation, intimidation and coercion. Workers could be asked to sign a card almost anywhere, including at their homes at night. Union organizers could go back to any worker who declines to sign until they get the desired result. The best way to ensure workforce privacy and worker protection is through the continued use of a federally supervised private ballot administered by the National Labor Relations Board.  
  • Card check could put government bureaucrats in charge of private business decisions.  Under this law, a business and union would only have 120 days to reach agreement on a contract, before being forced into binding arbitration. Then a government arbitrator, who has no understanding of the business, would be brought in to impose a two year wage and benefit contract without any vote by the employees.  
  • Card check represents a direct threat to the ability of small business to create jobs and lead our economic revival. The unemployment rate is 9.4 percent, its highest level in more than 25 years. It’s clear that America needs an economic and labor policy that will create jobs, not one that will make it harder for American businesses, especially small and medium sized ones, to keep and create new jobs.

Supporting Data

  • 87 percent of Americans believe that “a private vote on a secret ballot is a fundamental right” (source: McLaughlin & Associates, 2007).
  • Enactment of card check will increase the unemployment rate and substantially decrease the job creation rate. (Anne Layne-Farrar, Law and Economics Consulting Group study, 2009). 
  • Current law allows business owners to talk to their employees about unionization – the card check legislation removes that right.  
  • Unions support the card-check system because it stacks the deck completely in their favor, not because they are worried about the rights of workers. Research shows that secret-ballot voting produced a union victory an average of 58 percent of the time since 2000, and the card-check system produces a union victory 90 percent of the time.

Legislative Update

  • On March 10, key members in the House and Senate reintroduced the Employee Free Choice Act (H.R.1409/S.560). Rep. George Miller (Calif.), chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee introduced H.R. 1409 with 222 co-sponsors.
    Sens. Ted Kennedy (Mass.), chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, and Tom Harkin (Iowa) introduced S. 560 with 39 co-sponsors.

Both bills are identical to the legislation passed in the House and defeated in the Senate in the 110th Congress. The Senate is expected to act on the legislation first, and organized labor is pushing hard to bring the bill up for a vote in the fall.

 

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